


This is just the beginning

by mijra



Category: Bourne Legacy (2012)
Genre: French, Gen, Near Future, Socially marginal character, character sketch
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-05
Updated: 2012-12-05
Packaged: 2017-11-20 09:17:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,300
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/583730
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mijra/pseuds/mijra
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It takes her five years to get her life back together. In that time she is Jane the ghost, who she discards as soon as she's in Europe, then Julie, Jenny, and Martine. She has one advantage--maybe two: she's still smart, and she's desperate, at least at first.</p>
            </blockquote>





	This is just the beginning

It takes her five years to get her life back together. In that time she is Jane the ghost, who she discards as soon as she's in Europe, then Julie, Jenny, and Martine. She has one advantage--maybe two: she's still smart, and she's desperate, at least at first.

She knows only enough about security and technology to know what to avoid, and she tries to err on the side of excess. She presses buttons with her knuckles, starts noting security cameras and keeps her head down. She's good with her hands; she's good with the human body. In the small back-water towns, she answers to "Doctor", says she was with MSF. Then, later, says she was a midwife. In the larger cities, where they might check, she shrugs that off and takes construction jobs: carpentry, tiling, electricity, digging foundations. They pay her under the table.

She lets a man take her home, once, to avoid spending the night in the late October rain outside of Istanbul. He kissed her in his dingy kitchen with its cracked linoleum floor and a threadbare curtain hung in the doorway to hide the narrow bed in the back room. He pushed her against the standing sink with his hips, hands loose at her waist, and she found herself panicked, disgusted. He cursed when she pushed him away; she still hasn't decided whether it was more or less terrifying not to understand what he was saying. She slept in his bed that night. He slept on the floor. They smiled at each other over breakfast the next morning, used up the whole of their shared vocabularies on hello and thankyou.

Her sister thinks she's dead. She thinks about her sister a lot, about her parents, and the way they thought culture was important, which meant prep school in French until she swore she'd never speak a word of it again and Naomi moved to Montreal. Now, as Martine, she ends up in France. Stay small, Aaron told her, blend like you know, so she does, working odd jobs on the black market and traveling on foot or by TER because there's no name on the TER tickets, because she can buy them at a ticket machine in the gares without interacting with anyone who might remember her, and because they're cheap.

She no longer looks like a doctor, or a scientist, or the woman who survived a workplace shooting in Maryland, or much of anything, really. Her hands are worn. Her skin is darker from exposure and probably grime. She cuts her hair with children's scissors a couple of times, still doesn't quite recognize her eyes without what she used to think was subtle make-up. She eats a lot of kababs, wears donated clothes to replace the jeans she can't fit into any longer, her new muscle padded by a layer of comfortable softness. She'll catch her reflection in a window now and then, or above a sink in a public bathroom where she tries to freshen up, and recognizes Martine instead of Marta.

In the fall, she picks grapes for rich people, backbreaking work, and earns a pittance. In the winters, she sticks to small cities where, if she doesn't find a job, there are usually shelters for SDFs that open when the temperature drops too far, and a Resto' du Coeur in an old warehouse behind the Institute for Journalism where the food will at least be hot and the portions acceptable. She's older than the kids--troubled adolescents, idealists, anarchists--and younger than the chronic homeless who are often drunk or handicapped or both. It's all right; she's always been solitary. Her French improves, then her accent. The high school vocabulary floods back until she has to be careful not to drop the three- and four-syllable words that make her sound like the academic she used to be.

It can't last forever. Someday she'll have to come back from the dead and be a stranger again: Marta Shearing instead of Martine Charrier. Martine Charrier can't open a bank account or hold a legal job or show current ID at the post office, though she has an old paper identity card now, trafficked and long expired, that says she was born in 1974 in "Montauban (82)". She's never been to Montauban. She can't legally drive a car or take out any type of insurance or buy tickets for long-distance travel. Someday she'll want to settle; someday she'll get hurt or sick, and she has no illusions about how that would work in her current situation, in her moldy sublet room that she pays, like everything else, in cash and under the table. She can't even get a bus pass; she has no proof of address because she can't sign a renter's lease. She can't sign a lease because she can't produce current ID. She can't get current ID; there are microchips in the ID cards now, and card-readers link to a central database, she assumes. She's touched a computer twice in the past six months, but even before that she never could have hacked into a government database to create an identity for a person who doesn't exist.

But it works, for now. She's no-one, unbuilding her routines as quickly as she finds herself falling into them. There's still a blank US passport and ten thousand dollars she's never touched sewn into the lining of her jacket like Aaron taught her. His small handgun, which she's never used, is still wrapped in canvas and plastic at the bottom of her backpack. The backpack is the only thing she's stolen in five years, and she's proud of it--just worn enough to be ordinary, dark blue, Eastpak, like every school-kid has here.

It's late November when Aaron turns up in a soup kitchen in Marmande. She doesn't recognize him at first, doesn't know how long he's been there. The bénévols handing out meals seem to know him; he's bearded and droop-eyed and using an entirely too-realistic mental handicap to hide his slow French and foreign accent. Martine does a double-take and goes back to picking her fingernails while she waits in line. She last saw him on the other side of the chain-link fence around the port zone in Jakarta. No airports, he'd said, which didn't leave many options; she is never going to live on another island for the rest of her life. He doesn't look much different from the back: dark clothes, average height, average build, round shoulders. His hair has been clipped recently, still the same indescript cut she knew back then. She knew his whole body back then, clung to it.

He'd been so gentle with her, always had been, flirted gently from the exam table, spoke gently while he gently tipped her empty gun out of her hands, told her things that scared her in a gentle voice that made them easier to swallow. She watched him kill another person with nothing but his hands, then turn and pull her gently to her feet. She'd only felt safe with his body rocking gently into her, until she didn't any longer.

"Fous-moi la paix," she mutters when he passes her on his way to a table. He looks up at her voice, and it isn't Aaron at all, just a startled man. Those blue eyes, set widely under a supraorbital ridge, somehow remind her of him.

The next day she calls Peter Boyd from a payphone in a café. The owner makes her repeat her request twice; no one's used his payphone in years. She hangs up when someone else answers and rests her forehead against the back of the receiver, breathing shakily. Then she dredges up the only other number she still has memorized, and calls her sister.


End file.
